


As After The Sunset Fadeth In The West

by meggie272



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Confessions, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Night Before The Mission, Showers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 12:12:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1778701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meggie272/pseuds/meggie272
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I just think that maybe it’s better if we’re honest about things,” and Armin reaches out and takes Eren’s hand. Eren’s eyes go wide. </p><p>“A-Armin!”</p><p>“Eren,” Armin says.</p><p>There it is. </p><p>(It's the end of a hot day and they might die tomorrow and it's time to say the things that have been left unsaid.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	As After The Sunset Fadeth In The West

**Author's Note:**

> Being one of the fucking losers who's only watched the anime, I'm sorry for anything off. Does the SnK world have showers? I don't know. They have 3DMG, so maybe?

Eren leaves dinner early. It has been blisteringly hot all day, an unseasonable humidity that creeps inside his collar, makes rashes of sweat spread under his arms. Sitting in the stifling classroom for hours listening to the strategies over and over and over again like a litany had seemed like some kind of hell. He feels unclean, oppressed.

The thought of tomorrow is like a lead weight and a burning fuse all at once.

Crossing the courtyard to the shower block, he is struck by the sunset. It is like an open wound, blazing and violent. He stands for a moment in the damp heat, staring at the red-gold clouds, staring at the molten half-circle that is the sun. Someone, another cadet he doesn’t know, crosses the courtyard a few metres away. They do not acknowledge each other’s presence – the silence is too heavy for strangers to talk. A flock of birds scatter across the sky suddenly, black cut-outs against the brutal glory of the sky.

“Wow,” he says.

“It is very beautiful,” a voice behind him says, and he spins around in shock.

Armin smiles at him. He is carrying a rolled up towel underneath his arm.

“Oh. Hi, Armin,” Eren says, a little flustered. His heartbeat returns to its normal rate, not before a couple of uncomfortable pulsing thuds, shuddering in his chest.

“You didn’t see me, huh?”

“No, I was…uh. Distracted.” Eren looks back up at the sky. It is like blood and fire, and it’s starting to hurt his eyes, so he looks away. Armin hums in response. He is very small, against the bigness of the courtyard, the endless dome of flaming sky. “Do you really think it’s beautiful, Armin?” Eren asks, after a pause.

Armin bites his lip as if in thought. He is looking directly at the sun, like it doesn’t hurt him at all, and there is that yearning, defiant look in his eyes. _Fire water, oceans of sand,_ Eren remembers. Armin has always loved skies, endless things, possibilities of freedom, with an almost feverish intensity. He remembers his head bent over the books, when they were children, the way he pushed his hair out of his eyes with a hand trembling with excitement. The way his voice shook. The way he didn’t care that they could all go to jail for just looking at these beautiful, heady words, didn’t care at all. _People think he’s timid, but he’s burning up from the inside._

All of a sudden, Eren is terrified for him. _Tomorrow, tomorrow,_ his brain sings.

“Were you going to the showers?” he asks, quickly.

Armin looks away from the sky, squinting slightly. “Yeah. It’s been so hot all day.” He smiles, his hair glowing golden, damn near angelic, and Eren feels anguished inside.

“Well, let’s go then,” he says, turning and walking before the sentence is even finished. A gust of wind stirs the hot air limply around them and scatters dry leaves across the cobblestones. “We’ve got a while before the rest of the idiots stink the place up.”

Armin has to run a little to catch up with him, his boots loud in the silence of the yard. “Are you all right, Eren?” he asks, in that breathless way he has when he’s nervous.

“Yeah,” Eren says, because he is. He’s just jumpy. He’s too hot. And he’s feeling the pressing urge to grab Armin by his shoulders and look him in the eyes and say: _“don’t die, please don’t die”._ But Armin would hate him for it. So he won’t. Eren’s fine. He’s all right.

“Are you worried about the mission tomorrow – ” Armin begins, carefully, and Eren cuts him off with a sigh.

He is, he’s so worried he could throw up, but he’s fully aware of dark, incendiary glee jumping underneath his skin at the thought of killing more of them, the feeling of Titan blood scorching his skin, the way it feels to move through the air like a bird. It’s not the mission, the danger to his own self, that worries him.

“I don’t want to watch any more of my friends die,” he mutters. _I don’t want to watch you die._

“I’m scared too,” Armin says quietly, from behind him. “For my friends, and – and for myself. I wonder if it ever goes away.”

They are nearly at the shower block now. It sits squat and dirty-looking before them. He knows what Armin means. They live in fear, it sleeps in their beds. He isn’t sure if you can ever bleed it out, become numb to it, but would that be a life worth living? He pauses, feeling Armin behind him, a few paces away. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you, anyway. I won’t let you get hurt.”

There’s a silence, and Eren knows he’s said the wrong thing. Damn it. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t say anything stupid, anything that makes Armin’s back stiffen and his eyes go blank like he knows they are right now. “We’re not children any more, Eren,” Armin says in a small, tight voice. “We’re soldiers. You don’t take care of me anymore.”

Eren turns, and Armin’s hair is so bright it hurts, just like the sun. His eyes are enormous, saturated blue. “Okay then,” and he smiles, widely, the pain in his chest vicious and roaring like a wounded beast. “You can take care of me.”

Armin laughs. “Okay then.”

They shuffle through the narrow doorway, into the small, mouldy space with its peeling paint and unpredictable plumbing and smell of – oh.

There are two cadets, against the wall, and for half a moment Eren thinks they are fighting, grappling, but it turns out they’re kissing. Really kissing, a desperate and messy kind of kissing, hands gripping tight enough to bruise. A muddle of limbs, thigh pressed between white-clothed thighs, fingers knotting in hair and jacket, just a blur in the second before they realize they’ve been walked in on and turn their heads to stare in frozen shock.

They all stare at each other for a few moments, the boy pressed against the wall still with his hand tangled in the dark curls of the other. A tableau of interrupted passion, cut short so quickly that everyone involved is left feeling a little dizzy.

Eren presses his mouth together, spins on his heel and marches out.

His face is burning hotter than the sunset.  

He’d seen a bit of this kind of thing when they’d been back in training, kids taking any opportunity they had, driven by hormones, a fearful desire for comfort and a frantic need to stay close to the people you had. Eren had never joined in on the lewd jokes, the endless torrent of teasing the trainees involved were subjected to for days afterwards. There had been more important things to think about, to learn about, to worry about. Who _cared?_ And of course Eren had sometimes slid his hand into his shorts in the long hot nights and hoped everyone else in the dorm was asleep, and of course so had almost every other boy at some point or other, and of course he knew that people fucked, and of course he wasn’t a prude about it all. But the steely professionalism of the Scouting Legion was a different atmosphere. No one did that kind of thing here. Even if people did whisper guilty jokes about the Captain and the Commander every now and then (sometimes the tension was so strong _something_ had to break it, even if they were all adults and soldiers fighting for humanity’s future). Any private attachments were kept private, controlled, behind doors. It wasn’t displayed in public, it – it wasn’t _messy,_ it didn’t interfere with the activity of the Corps, with the mission, with the goal.

You didn’t do it in the fucking _showers._

Eren feels even more unsettled now. It had been awful to walk in on that. Not just embarrassing. Awful. There’d been something about those two, the way they were kissing like it was the last chance they’d ever have. Like they might die. Like they were terrified.

And then, Eren realizes, that all of those things may well be the case.

He feels his resolve starting to fall apart a little inside. Seeing that, seeing the insistent, desperate goodbye, pressed flush and hard against the wall, seeing Armin so tiny and thin against the bloody sun, it reminds him of his own fear and his own despairing, fractured need to hold people close and never let them go. It reminds him of the way that sometimes he wants to press himself _hard_ against someone, against another warm body _,_ wants to relieve the tension and show his love and say farewell all in one furious rutting burst of – of something -

Armin is saying something, faint through the walls, but he can hear the high-pitched apologetic note in it, and then the two cadets hurry out through the doors. Their heads are down and they do not look at Eren as they pass. Eren stares, a little overwhelmed by what it means to be human.

Armin follows, his cheeks pink.

“Geez,” Eren murmurs, watching them go.

Armin laughs nervously, hushed. “Well, that was embarrassing.”

“Yeah. Um.” Eren shakes his head, trying to clear his thoughts. “We should shower now. If there’s no one else…making use of it.”

“Okay,” Armin nods, his cheeks still red, his freckled, pale skin flush. It looks like it would be burning to the touch. It never takes that much to make Armin blush.

The showerheads are separated by stone walls, open at the front. Eren tries not to listen to the sound of Armin undressing, the noise of his zipper, the soft brush of cloth over skin. He stands there, shirtless, his skin prickling even though it’s not cold in this mouldy, fetid room. For a brief second he imagines Armin’s skin, pale in the low light. They used to bathe together when they were children, but for years he hasn’t seen that much of Armin except the flashes of white skin at his throat when his shirt is unbuttoned, glimpses through tears in his clothes, the surprisingly elegant lines of his bare feet, a few moments of bare chest and back.

Then he hears the sputter of the ancient shower, strange coughing, gurgling noises. “Come on,” he hears Armin mutter, and then a somewhat steady stream begins, a soft and hissing hush, punctuated with the occasional splutter.

Eren pulls his pants down over his thin hips, and thinks of nothing but trying to get the shower to work, thinks of nothing but the way the water feels against his sore muscles and his feverish skin. Cold, cleansing, sluicing away the dirt and the sweat. The freezing temperature is wonderful. It calms the heat of the day and the heat inside his mind, soothes his fevered blood.

He thinks of nothing, until he hears Armin cough, barely audible under the rush of water.

_Armin._

Eren stares determinedly at the opposite wall, and waits until his hands have stopped shaking.  

Armin has survived missions before. He is smart, and fast, and he can take care of himself, and they will both come back alive, to crowds cheering, and Eren will hug him, smelling of blood and sweat, and hold him close, and feel his heart beat against his own, and they’ll both be alive –

But every time they go out on a mission, someone dies, more people that Eren knows and respects, and their numbers are dwindling, slowly but surely – what if next time it’s him, Armin, who has been his friend since he was five, what if next time it’s Armin _and_ Mikasa _and_ Jean _and_ Connie, what if, what if.

He reaches out and turns off the water. Stands there for a moment, naked, and then towels himself dry. Armin’s water coughs to a halt as well. He’s not lingering, not that anyone would under water that cold.  

Eren pulls on his pants and undershirt, and steps out into the main room, grabbing his jacket from where it hangs, wrinkled, on a hook against the wall. He is about to shrug it on, when Armin appears, his hair dripping wet and hanging in his eyes. He is wearing nothing except his shorts, holding his shirt in one hand. Eren blinks a little. Armin became shy about nudity when they joined military service, never wanting to be undressed and vulnerable amongst the crowds of sweaty, broad-shouldered boys. But then, it’s just the two of them now, and maybe Armin doesn’t care if it’s Eren seeing him.

They stand there, varying degrees of undressed. There are a few moments of eye contact, of complete stillness. The _drip drip_ of the leaking showers is impossibly loud. Armin is staring at him like he’s just realized something incredibly important, his eyes enormous, his shoulders tense, and Eren knows he is gearing up to say something. He can’t quite handle the silence, so he starts to pull on his shirt and jacket.

“…you think they could have found somewhere more private,” he says through the shirt he’s pulling on over his head.

“They might die tomorrow,” he hears Armin say.

Eren emerges through the neck of his shirt, his wet hair sticking up in clumps. Armin’s expression makes him take in a quick gasp of air. There is something intense and purposeful in his best friend’s eyes.  

“We might all die tomorrow,” Armin continues. He steps forward.  

There’s a strange buzzing in Eren’s ears. He stares very hard at a patch of mould on the far wall, but like a magnet his gaze is drawn to his friend’s. Armin is close now. A drop of water runs from the dark blonde hair plastered to his neck, and slides down over the thin swoop of his clavicle, down his chest. Eren watches its path downover the lean lines of Armin’s body – still as bony as it was, but now with a wiry kind of strength, from the years of training, movement, fighting. Armin was right. They aren’t children any more. They haven’t been children for a long time.

“Armin…” Eren murmurs.

“They don’t want to die,” Armin says, softly, hesitatingly, “they don’t want to die and leave things unsaid.”

“They weren’t saying much,” Eren whispers. Armin laughs, nervously, and takes another step closer, his hands bunched into fists at his side. Armin is almost quivering. Eren can see how scared he is, he can feel how young they both are, how the world falls away around them, so it’s just him, and Armin, always.  He swallows hard.

“You’re strong, Eren,” Armin says, frowning, breathing heavy, “and I know you’ll be all right.”

“You’ll be all right too, Armin,” Eren says, trying to keep his voice steady. Has he ever told Armin that he still has nightmares of him being swallowed by that Titan, and Eren useless and crippled and bleeding, watching from the roof? He’s never told him, because Armin hates it when Eren and Mikasa fuss over him, and Eren has a habit of never saying things until it’s too late, anyway.

They can both feel that something is about to happen, that this isn’t just a normal conversation. Armin knows what it is, there’s a determination in his eyes, but Eren can’t _quite_ pin it down.

“I just think that maybe it’s better if we’re honest about things,” and Armin reaches out and takes Eren’s hand. Eren’s eyes go wide.

“A-Armin!”

“Eren,” Armin says.

There it is.

“How – how long?”

Armin is about to reply, or maybe he’s about to – to _kiss_ him or something, and Eren is already feeling the relief of the tension being broken, already anticipating the catharsis of this, the years of aching finally burning their way down to this, this moment, right here – but there is a shout, worryingly close, and they jump away from each other like they’ve been scalded.

An onslaught of young cadet males pours through the door, headed by Connie, who is already pulling his clothes off enthusiastically.

“God, it’s been hot as ass all day, oh hey ErenandArmin, so _that’s_ why you two snuck out so early? You owe me twenty bucks, Jean – ” And somehow he’s already naked. That boy undresses as quickly as he talks. Eren wants to punch him.

“Goodbye, Connie,” Eren says stiffly, grabbing Armin by the wrist and yanking him through the sudden clot of people until they’re out the door and free.

“Have a good shower!” Armin calls apologetically over his shoulder.

The sun has gone down now, and the sky is soft lavender and duck-egg blue. It is the twilight hour now, not yet dark. One star has come out, a single pinprick of light.

Armin makes a face and pulls his shirt down over his head. _“Eren.”_

Eren feels dizzy. His clothes are damp against his skin. The cobblestones are cold under the soles of his feet, and at the realization that both he and Armin are barefooted, he groans. “We left our shoes.”

Armin buries his face in his hands, but Eren can hear him giggle. He groans and runs his hands through his damp hair, the sky spinning above him. “I’m not going back in there,” and then he starts to laugh too, and they both laugh, with only a touch of hysteria. Some kind of happiness bubbles inside him. He’s not sure if he’d call it joy, but it’s the nicest thing he’s felt in a while.

The laughter dies away, and Eren stands with his hands in his pockets, staring up at the sky. It is a progressively darker blue the further it gets away from the sunset. The moon hangs low near the horizon.

“Since always,” Armin says eventually.

Eren feels his heart twist a little, and he can’t meet his quite yet, so he clears his throat and shoves his hands deeper in his pockets and keeps looking upwards. He can hear faint laughing and hooting from the shower block, and knows that the other cadets are all as terrified as they are, despite their noise, and maybe they will have similar conversations with their friends tonight, or tomorrow, or in a week or a month if they survive.

Finally, he turns and looks at Armin, who quirks one side of his mouth up in a resigned half-smile. There are deep shadows beneath his eyes.

Eren cannot think of a single good, proper thing to say. His throat hurts. He’s not going to cry. He _isn’t._ A mosquito is buzzing near his ear, high and sharp.

“Don’t die,” he whispers. His vision blurs and wavers a little, and he tries to blink it away.

Armin’s eyes are dry, and his hand is soft when he reaches it out to Eren, and Eren takes it, bridging the gap between them.

“I’ll do my best,” he says, almost serenely.

“Good,” Eren says, too sharp.

“You too,” Armin adds.

Eren swallows. “I’ll try,” he says, and as he says it he drops his jacket on the ground and pulls Armin into a hug. He buries his face in Armin’s soft hair and hears the gentle _frush_ as Armin’s jacket and towel hit the cobblestones as well, so that one of Armin’s hands can grab on to the thin cloth of his shirt, and the other can slide up to the nape of his neck, gentle as a whisper.

Barefoot and wet-haired, they stand like that for a long time. The stars come out. Armin’s breath is hot and steady against his skin. Eren thinks of all the things he wants to say to Armin, and all the things he wants to do, later, when they survive this mission and they come home to each other. He imagines that Armin is thinking them too, and silent, they stand.


End file.
